Introduction to Search Engines   

    As an intro to the wide world of search engines, here are a few tidbits on the history and development of these internet tools that internet surfers can’t live without.

    The very first search engine was used on the internet primarily for searching through files exchanged through file transfer protocol (FTP) in the year 1990. This feat can be attributed to a certain Alan Emtage, a computer science student from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His primitive search engine was named Archie, which was dubbed as an electronic directory service, and whose name was derived from the term “archive.” Emtage actually began a trend that has impacted the World Wide Web in more ways than one.

    Following the potential success of Archie, other web developers came up with Veronica and Jughead versions of the rudimentary search engine. Veronica stood for Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives, while Jughead was Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display.

    In 1993, the very first search engine that could look through the web, and still exists today is AliWeb. In the next year, WebCrawler became the first full text search engine, which could pick up sites based on the text content. Because of WebCrawler’s ability to do so, it became the standard of how modern day search engines operate.

    From 1994 to 1995, search engines such as Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista came into operation, and were among the very first fully functional search engines for internet users. Some of the earlier search engines are now non-existent, or have been absorbed by larger companies.
The year 1998 up to the turn of the new millennium drew the path towards the launching of the biggest and most dominant search engines known today. Google was born in 1998 and showed promising potential up to 2000 onwards, while Yahoo search and MSN search became formally launched in 2004 to 2005.

    Baidu, a China-based search engine launched in 2000 became one of the most powerful ones in the Asian region, with a notably large percentage of the se arch engine market share.
Some of the most recently launched search engines are Ask.com, Wikiseek, and AskWiki, which were established from 2006 to 2007.

    Having known this history of search engines, are you curious to know about how search engines make money? According to the Search Engine Strategies Conference, major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN believe first in making their results and services more relevant to the billions of users who need them.

    How have search engines achieved this? It is important for them to update their technologies and tools to be in tune with the ever-changing needs of web searchers or search engine users. It is also essential that the search engine’s user interface is easy to use and understand.
For the webmasters, search engines should constantly provide better tools to help them with their SEO concerns. Examples of these tools are Google Adwords, Yahoo and Overture services, and others. More on these tools will be discussed in chapter 9.

    Also, as explained by the Search Engine Strategies Conference, internet search engines earn a lot of profits from commercial searches and services. These include paid advertisements by partner sites and the like. Also, big search engines like Yahoo and Google continue to improve their services for their users by offering email accounts, web hosting, and instant messaging, among many others.

    You should know that the internet and the technologies that go along with search engines are constantly improving. In this regard, trends on search engine success can change over time. In the next section, you will learn about values and the significance of search engine market share.

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